ions, and to which he specially calls the attention of all
superiors, the zeal of all their subjects. They are, good example; prayer;
works of {185} charity to the poor, the imprisoned, the diseased; the
writing of books of piety and religious instruction; the use of the
sacrament of penance; preaching; pious congregations; spiritual retreats;
national and foreign missions; and education of youth in public and
gratuitous schools. In the catholic scheme of religion, each of these
things is deemed important; and the united voice of all, who knew Jesuits,
gives them the full credit of having, during their existence in a body,
cultivated, with success, each of these several branches. Their preachers
were heard and admired in every country; their tribunals of penance were
crouded; the sick and dying were always secure of their attendance, when
demanded; their books of devotion were everywhere read with confidence; the
good example, resulting from the purity of their morals, secured them, even
in the last fatal persecution, from inculpation, it disabled the malice of
calumny. In the impossibility of criminating living Jesuits, their worst
enemies could only revile the dead. Hospitals, workhouses, and lazarets,
were the constant scenes {186} of their zeal; their attendance on them was
reckoned an appropriate duty of their society. During the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, when the plague successively ravaged every country
in Europe, many hundreds of Jesuits are recorded to have lost their lives
in the service of the infected. Several perished, in the same exercise of
charity, in the last century, at Marseilles and Messina; and, during the
late retreat of the French army from Moscow, not less than ten Jesuits died
of fatigue and sickness, contracted in the hospitals crouded with those
French prisoners, who, a little before, had ejected them from their
principal college, at Polosk, after having plundered it of every valuable.
It would be tedious to insist upon every point; but something I must say on
the articles of missions and public schools, the two principal scenes of
their zeal.

With respect to missions, the Jesuits might truly apply to themselves the
verse,

Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?
AEN. lib. i.

{187} Their perseverance in this field of zeal was universally admired; it
secured success during more than two centuries; and the latest missionary
expeditions of t